Fresh from NVIDIA’s groundbreaking innovations notification on AI at CES 2025 on Tuesday, the crypto industry is full of ideas. Observers see a radical shift in cryptocurrencies: the next wave of users may not be human at all.
Leading cryptocurrency creators and investors are predicting a future where blockchain networks will be dominated by artificial intelligence agents, not humans — but they’re divided on how we’ll get there and what that means for everyone else.
“We’ll see a billion agents on the chain before we see a billion people on the chain,” predicts Twitter user Evan, Head of Ecosystem at Monad and former McKinsey analyst. “Crypto has an inherently hostile user interface for human users. Agents don’t care about that friction.”
The predictions come amid a surge in the development of AI agents for crypto, with platforms like Virtuals already generating $60 million in revenue.
cryptocurrencies the latest meta also recorded certain assets from projects such as AI16z skyrocket in demand for AI agent tokens.
Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner of Dragonfly Capital, points to changes in accessibility, where “instead of having to raise millions of dollars” developers could “launch an AI cloud computing application for $10,000”.
This democratizes who can build and deploy blockchain applications and could “lead to a renaissance in the chain,” Qureshi claims.
However, the implications go beyond just cost-effectiveness.
Qureshi raises ethical concerns about authentication and trust in digital interactions, predicting that “chatbots will start to hide that they are AI” and “pass as humans”.
Qureshi argues that most current “AI agents” in cryptocurrencies are not what they should be, at least in their current versions. “These things aren’t really agents. They’re chatbots with meme coins attached,” notes Qureshi.
Crypto and AI go hand in hand
In September of last year, Delphi Labs, a project focused on research and development of the Web3 protocol, released a work on how artificial intelligence could affect cryptocurrencies in the coming years.
While AI could be a powerful resource “deeply affecting society,” it also risks being “exclusively controlled by big tech and the state,” according to a Delphi Labs article.
Delphi Labs claims that cryptocurrencies “can prevent this monopoly” by “providing developers and users with a truly better solution.”
The transformation is already starting, with some projects like Wayfinder developing features for AI agents interact autonomously with blockchain networks.
Should the average Joe be concerned?
Yuk Hui, a contemporary philosopher trained as a software engineer, thinks not.
Machines like AI agents “will not completely replace human beings” because it “may take longer than the extinction of the human species,” Hui he wrote more than three years ago.
Instead, “machine intelligence will transform people (…) beyond their own imagination”.
Edited Sebastian Sinclair
Daily analysis Bulletin
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